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Friday, 5 October 2018

Technical Damage - The Introspect

Labels: Self-Released

Formats: Digital

Release Date: 15 Sep 2018

Tracklist:

1. I: Everything Is Forever

2. Reflections

3. Reshape

4. Crystal Angels

5. II: Awakenings

6. Eviscerate

7. The Introspect

The weeks are flying by faster than ever, which is fine with me as it means that I get to Friday night quicker and I get to curl up with my favourite beverage and some awesome music, which tonight is delivered by Canadian death metal band Technical Damage. The band formed towards the end of 2016 with the release of their debut EP " Damaged Nation" and they've only recently released their debut full-length "The Introspect". When a metal band sites influences such as Killswitch Engage, Misery Signals and Opeth, it's usually a good sign so lets see...

Modern metal albums wouldn’t be complete without the obligatory atmosphere-building intro song and it’s present here in I: Everything Is Forever. Reflections is the first sign of Technical Damage’s progressive death metal and it doesn’t initially contain the level of melody that their intro promised. What it does deliver though is low brutal vocals and instrumentation that flits between modern death and post-hardcore. It’s clearly slick but the volume of recording seems a little low on early listen. The guitar work and solo’s are great though! Their music can at times be considered Djent (oh how I hate that term) but as Reshape shows, they are so much more than that. Technical Damage fits a lot into their songs and musically they are incredibly tight. The mathy elements towards the end take things in another direction as well.

Things get heavier on Crystal Angels, which is definitely a more straight-up death metal song, albeit with a few breakdown-like riffs here and there. There’s some passionately delivered clean vocals that sit well alongside the melodic guitar and make the heavier sections sound heavier still. They break up the album with a rousing instrumental piece called II: Awakenings, which is quite folk-sounding. It leads into penultimate song Eviscerate. The Spanish guitar is a welcome addition that seems to fit the album perfectly and gives Technical Damage a very different sound and feel. It gives way to yet another blast of off-kilter death metal that’s more progressive than technical. The quieter acoustic-led passages are more European than North American.

With the title-track placed at the end of the album, Technical Damage has one more shot at atmospheric drama and the intro to the song manages to achieve that drama. They follow it with more rhythmically intelligent metal that’s surprisingly easy on the ear. The reggae in the mid-section does nothing to change that either. Overall, this album is very well played and Technical Damage are sound at what they do. This will definitely appeal to those with a modern metal disposition and that’s no bad thing.

You can stream and purchase "The Introspect" digitally below (and from all of the usual outlets):-